Aubrey Plaza proved that her years of playing April, the resident prankster on Parks and Recreation, were worth it when she pulled a major prank on her castmates in Italy while filming the movie Spin Me Round.
“I pretty much made up a very little phoney Italian custom,” Plaza admitted to PEOPLE during a private screening of the movie at the London Hotel in West Hollywood. The movie was directed by Plaza’s husband, Jeff Baena, who also co-wrote the script with star Alison Brie. “After you shoot in Italy, they have a tradition where you get pied in the face when you picture-wrap,” I told every actor.
Plaza was able to persuade her co-stars, including Brie, Molly Shannon, Fred Armisen, Debby Ryan, Ego Nwodim, and Ayden Mayeri, that a made-up tradition was true and that they should each anticipate getting a pie in the face after filming was finished.
“Is that true?” asked every actor. Yes, that’s what the Italians do, I say, “Plaza clarified. “I then made a firm commitment to doing that. And I basically planned a pie for each actor. No matter how long the day had been or how worn out the performers were, we had 11 or 12 of them in the film. A f—-ing pie was thrown in each of their faces. And now I’m going to make it a thing, so it’ll keep!”
Brie claims she was astounded by how successful and contagious Plaza’s prank turned out to be. Everyone adored it and was afraid of it, she joked. “It took on fairly quick.” “So every time the day came when the next person was going to wrap, it was like everybody knew that the pieing was coming, and we had to be increasingly cunning about how we would pie them,” says the author.